


Acquiring Tastes

by TeratoCybernetics



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Adaptation, Culture Shock, Food, Food Porn, Gen, Identity, Slice of Life, Synaesthesia, and the point fell off, but not yet, terezi watches C-Span, the fluff it went sideways, troll/human au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-08
Updated: 2012-03-08
Packaged: 2017-11-01 15:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/pseuds/TeratoCybernetics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sometimes Dave returns bringing his own dinner in the same sack, and you both eat and talk about your time spent before going to sleep. Tonight he had fairly crawled back from the dj thing, trailing the sickly-brown reek of those awful cigarette things humans like. Underneath that, you could smell that he was deeply bone-tired, a scent like rainclouds approaching and dust just under his skin. You finished one more volley in an online argument with Vriska and blocked her for good measure before closing the husktop so he could hand you a huge paper bag. It crinkled in your grasp, redolent with wonderful odours."</p><p>An exploration of Terezi's senses and food, heavily pT-influenced, that kind of tried to become a consideration of adaptation on both personal and larger scales, because I am apparently incapable of fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acquiring Tastes

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Xenos](https://archiveofourown.org/works/219707) by [paraTactician](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician). 



He’s gone to bed. Finally!

  
You’re sitting on the floor with a paper sack, in the common area of what Dave calls his apartment and what you still think of as a hivestem division, and probably always will.

  
Every bit of you aches from sparring on the roof with his brother while Dave was off at some gathering-place, doing his music thing. Practice had gotten old once you fought one another to falling over -twice!- with no real victor, so you had come back inside, taking turns washing up before making coffee and peanut butter crackers. Then you collapsed on the couch to watch what you think are called ‘procedural cop dramas’ with Dirk until he had other things to do. They’re _terrible_ , they get everything wrong and are mostly interchangeable in plots. One has a cheerful girl who speaks primarily in Sollux’ technical gibberish, and the other one seems to be more about cute people shipping, but it’s still fun to lie there using Pyralspite as a pillow, yelling at them for all the legal mistakes, and some of the things that are just fucking weird about humans. Unlike the coolkid, his brother will watch these with you, offering a scathing dissection of their misuse of science, often while messing with the innards of one of his robots.

  
Sometimes Dave returns bringing his own dinner in the same containers, and you both eat and talk about how your time was spent before going to sleep. Tonight he had fairly crawled back from the dj thing, trailing the sickly-brown reek of those awful cigarette things humans like. Underneath that, you could smell that he was deeply bone-tired, a scent like rainclouds approaching and dust just under his skin. You finished one more volley in an online argument with Vriska and blocked her for good measure before closing the husktop so he could hand you a huge paper bag. It crinkled in your grasp, redolent with wonderful odours. Then he collapsed into a seat without a word, graceful as a sack of dead wigglers. After some prodding, some more cajoling, and a few strategically cold licks to his weirdly warm human abdomen, you convinced him that sleeping in a bed would be a better idea, that you knew his resistance was pure spite and he had no real reason to fight it like he was.

  
It’s almost dawn, the light outside the blinds smells like lemonade and woodsmoke shot through with hints of grapefruit-pink. It also smells like heat, like the temperature creeping upwards as the sun rises, warming cement and brick and tar. Though it’s a lot more arid than your forest, and the days are sometimes truly sweltering, you don’t envy anyone who landed in Rose’s often-frozen locale. After the last visit, you decided that this place is much closer to what you remember of home, and the thought makes the empty place in you where ‘home’ used to be seem less raw.

  
You know the bag contains food. For you, it’s dinner, but more than that, it’s part of an ongoing learning experience, a schoolfeed in Earth through cooking. Whenever Dave has a DJ job, and it’s happening more and more recently so you guess he’s getting good or something, he brings home food from one of the innumerable-seeming nutrition preparation shops this place has. You’d go with him, except most humans aren’t used to seeing your kind around yet. Until trollkind becomes more visible, until more of your species filters through whatever cracks the game has left in reality, and the blended world it seems to be reaching towards attains something resembling equilibrium, you wait, you go out when and where things are empty, quiet. You have learned to reserve your patience for when it’s important, and you still have a lot to learn. Anyway, the surprise!-whats-for-dinner game is fun.

  
Opening the bag makes a great deal of noise that only seems louder in the predawn quiet. Reaching in, you remove a bottle first; lick up the side to get an idea of what to expect, and get the suggestion of clarity, transparency, and under the plastic, a penetrating sweetness, and a purest alizarin that nearly makes your toes curl, a shade nature would disown for its very lewdness, festooned with glittering bubbles that spark inside your nasals even without opening the lid. Up the label, the loopy human letters describe ‘CHEERWINE’, whatever the fuck that means. They name everything and little of it ever means a goddamned thing. It’s getting warm, and you’ve found it a universal constant that sodas are improved by cold temperatures, so you pad over to the refrigeration block and set it in the freezing section.

  
Then you click on the television, turn the channel to the one that shows all the governmental processes. It’s nothing like Alternian courts, their version is a bunch of ancient humans wheedling, bickering quietly over nothing that seems to matter in the context of the intended topic of discussion. It is endless bureaucracy turned in on itself by self-interest you can smell even through the tickling static of television. There are no fights to the death or anything! Ever! But you are here and with the way things are going, you want to learn how the other side of things function, to keep track of where things touch and change, and where they stay the same. 

  
You reach inside the bag again, pull out something weighty and oblong, warm with the smell of bread and some kind of meat, and more besides, wrapped in the sharp metal tang of foil. Until you began carefully unwrapping this, you hadn’t noticed you were hungry again, but now your digestion sac has begun to wrap around your spinal column in complaint. It’s some kind of sandwich, a category of food whose only consistent parts seem to be forms of bread, existing to convey whatever else the creator wants to put in or on it. Try as you might have when you were still bitter about landing in _their_ world, not yours, the perigees during which that astringency was all you could taste, you can’t find any fault with the concept.

  
Still hot, the filling spills a little over your fingers, and you lick it off before spreading out the wrapper on the floor. It’s a thick, meaty scarlet, a blend of ground, cooked animal and some kind of tart red fruit and so many other, subtler, things it makes your head spin. It’s savoury and salty, and just a hair sweet, there are herbs and seeds and oils, complex as any music Dave has ever played for you. It’s very similar to pizza, in many ways, and that is a sign he was truly exhausted; there doesn’t seem to be as much thought in this meal, in whether you’ve had the components or no, he just defaulted to red things. You’re not complaining; it’s really kind of adorable.

  
Sprawling across the carpet on your belly and elbows, kicking a stack of GameBro and other detritus out of the way behind you, you stuff a third of it in your mouth in one go and listen to the Congress of something or other. It’s nowhere near as exciting as innuendo would imply. Someone’s pointing at charts that spell out in excruciating detail just how much the other guy across the room sucks without actually having the frond to say it in as many words. Maybe an Honourable Tyranny will appear to eat all of them for sheer incompetence, if you wait long enough.

  
Underneath all the sauce, folded in there with cooked, spicy vegetables, you find a substantial portion of the meat-thing Dave calls ‘sausage’. Despite the endless litany of dick jokes there are to be made, you honestly find this food-construction an incredibly fucking novel thing. This one is lumpy, earthy, cooked with a high heat so there’s a layer of salty, crunchy char on the outside. The inside of it is spotted with seeds and more sharp, green herbs.

  
Humans don’t ever seem to be satisfied with killing and eating a thing. They’ve made a high art out of even the base chore of feeding oneself, all of it more complex then culling law or engineering, in some cases careful as apiculture networking. Sausages, in their bewildering variety, define the essence of this idea. In them, some part of an animal is ground up, to what degree depends on the kind of sausage, and there seem to be dozens at _least_. The mixture is stuffed inside another prepared part, all of it spiced with varied recipes. Sometimes they’re smoked or salted or cooked as part of the crafting, sometimes left raw for later cooking. There are a million more efficient ways to feed oneself, but so much of food here seems to develop out of this peculiar drive to make the experience better, more interesting. And yeah, all of them tend to look a bit like bulges, human or otherwise, but when that joke starts to get old, you make sure to bite the end off a hot dog very emphatically while one of the Striders are looking, just so you can listen to them wince.

  
Mouth full of sandwich, you check the bag for anything else, just to be certain before you clean up. Your claws find a small paper box in the bottom, under a pile of napkins and plastic utensils and a few packets of ketchup. Those make you laugh a little. It took you a while to figure out that, while you adore ketchup itself, it does not go on everything, despite the sheer amount of it takeout places throw at their customers. Your object lesson had been an ice cream of some sort. Something, again, with a stupid name, maybe the elder Strider’s favourite Moose Tracks. Whatever the fuck a moose is, that combination had been a travesty to every one of your remaining senses.

  
The paper box is extracted gingerly, and placed off to the side with one of the little forks.

  
Someone on the TV strikes a gavel, and instinct tips you up sharp, chewing and swallowing another likely-too-large bite that goes down like an ambitious slitherbeast’s dinner. For a moment, you are at full attention. The politicians are moving on to their next pile of inanities. You listen to what it is, head cocked, something about taxes this time, in the almost-an-entirely-different-language of roundabout, purposefully complicated speech that makes you want to bite something, hard. Instead you settle for hissing, very quietly, before stuffing the last of the sandwich in your facehole, and chewing as if it’s the faces of everyone who’s made this process so willfully obtuse as you get up to retrieve your soft drink. Outside, the light is going lemony-orange-peach, still a soft vapour of colour like spun sugar, not quite the relentless sour-lemon-gold of full day, yet, but that isn’t far. You yawn hugely and pull the door open. You haven’t gone diurnal, but you are getting to sleep earlier than you were on your own, and the long night is beginning to weigh some.

  
The outside of the bottle is satisfyingly cold now. You can’t leave these too long in the freezing unit, they tend to explode, but a few minutes isn’t a problem. Opening it, the lid hisses and spits as the seal gives, and the smell is a fan of fireworks-scarlet. At the first sip, a single, overpowering note of red swallows your senses, none of the complexity of the actual cherries you’ve had, just a laser-bright flavour that seems to turn your whole world and every cell in you to the purest candy-red. This time, your toes do curl a bit, and you choke back a short trill.

  
“Wow.” Cheerwine, huh? You’re grinning a bit despite yourself. All the sugar will definitely have your thinkpan going for a bit longer. “You’re lucky you’re so tired, coolkid. This shit should be scheduled fucking illegal.” The door shuts with a soft sound, and you follow the lingering scent of your meal back to the tv room to see what’s inside the little paper box. The politicians are rambling about numbers, and you can hear the deception in their words. It tastes like vinegar and onion, and you swallow more of the Cheerwine to chase the sour note of it away. As you sit on the floor again, back to the soft multiseat unit, you carefully open the box. Inside, nestled in layers of paper and sugarwhite frosting, your fingertips find a slice of cake in the deepest red you’ve ever encountered, garnet like your very surname, but plush and lush like velvet. The fork goes in like it’s froth, foam, nothing remotely solid, and separates a small amount.

  
Cake, as you’ve found, is something similar to bread, baked in similar ways, but moister, and most often sweet. This is the best example of it you’ve had yet. The icing is a smooth, dense spread, there’s a hint of sour to it, but it’s complementary, not clashing. It sets off the faint cocoa-tinged raspberry-claret of the cake itself, which is so fine, it melts away before you even attempt to set teeth to it. You get up just to flop over on seat cushions, poke at the cake, try different ratios of icing-to-red in tiny nibbles so you don’t decimate it before figuring out the best way to eat it. One-to-one doesn’t work well; the frosting is cloying, then. One-to-three, or even -four seems best, allowing for the cake’s softness to gain a little extra moisture from whatever the icing is made of, bringing that faint lemony-yogurt note to the top.

  
So little of what your kind did - _does?_ \- is ever simply for enjoyment, it’s hard to comprehend the hedonism that leads to this kind of thought being put into mere food. You’ve been reading about their past on your husktop and listening to some of it on your little pocket phone-thing alone on the roof while practising with your sword-cane, or just listening to the city. Their history seems no less bloody than yours. It’s only confined to a far smaller arena, what with their spaceflight capabilities still amounting to no more than a hatchlings’ first crawl.

  
It is also full of creation, art and music, architecture, theatre and food, leaving you wondering where the impulse to create things comes from. What would your kind be capable of if they really, truly tried? If they were allowed the time and mental space to pursue these impulses beyond the fractional indulgence allowed in wigglerhood and adolescence? As a species, you’re exceptional at fighting and conquering, there is no denying that, and in your studies you’ve seen fragments of it that couldn’t be fought out, marked as sedition and treason, and strung out in the sun to burn away instead. You can’t believe that the other side of that coin can be eliminated, that you are incapable of creation as a race and the individuals you know are aberrations. That’s absolute crap; humans can obviously handle both and you essentially made them.

  
 _You made them. That’s a good place to start, isn’t it?_

  
You carefully lick frosting from between fork tines and think. The background murmur of useless governmental figures is beginning to rasp and wear through your ability to ignore, so you click the television off, listen to the electricity draining off the screen, to the soft echo of traffic somewhere outside, building like a distant tide.

  
As you finish the last of your dessert, chasing remnants and crumbs around the crinkling wax paper with your tongue, you conclude than you should learn to cook. At least a little bit. Human food does seem difficult, inefficient, but how hard could it be when the people on television do it so often that there’s a whole channel for it? The humans on tv are almost all idiots. Except for that Abby-person.

  
And even if it is difficult, when have you ever backed down from a challenge? The weight of your meal and the long sparring session are beginning to catch up to the sugar for dominance in your thinkpan, beginning to speak sense, but you’re riding this idea at least until you finish cleaning up, dumping all your trash into the empty delivery bag, and then the bag into the larger waste container. There’s definite merit to it as an experiment in adaptation, in proving that you don’t have to give up being what you are to learn from humanity at all. That’s not learning, that’s assimilation. If you’re all going to be living together on the same planet, there will be lessons to trade, and compromises to work out. Clean up the fucking oceans for the nastier of us, and maybe we’ll take up painting and baking in favour of killing or enslaving everyone here. The thought brings a small, dry chuckle as you envision someone like Eridan attempting to make cookies, as you try to map any possible way this future could go quietly, smoothly, and utterly fail to do either.

  
You yawn hugely, jaw-crackingly, and make your way to the ablution trap to clean your teeth, then to your respiteblock to strip down to your underthings, setting an alarm on your tiny computerphone before you slide into warm slime. You think you saw a slab of bacon in the freeze-block, and bacon’s pretty fucking simple as well as delicious. Maybe you’ll surprise Dave and Dirk tomorrow, and try cooking it for breakfast.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my god. I have realised, after posting this; Cheerwine is carbonated Swedish Fish. Mind. BLOWN.


End file.
